ROKIA TRAORÉ
Beautiful Africa
“It’s clear that it’s inspired by rock music,” says Mali’s international star Rokia Traoré
of her new album, Beautiful Africa. “But I didn’t want to make rock and roll in the
Western tradition...I wanted something that’s rock and roll but still Malian and still
me.”
The past year has been a quite extraordinarily productive period for Traoré. One of
the most inventive female singer/songwriters in Africa today, she is remarkable not
just for the range of her powerful and emotional voice but also for the sheer variety
of her work. She has written three wildly different new sets of music: the acoustic
Damou (Dream), the often bluesy Donguili (Sing), and the rock-influenced Donke
(Dance), in which she set out to show “three different aspects of Malian culture and
my own personality.” Produced by the UK’s prestigious Barbican, all three were
performed at different London venues in one week last summer—a feat she
repeated at this year’s Sydney Festival in Australia. She has toured Britain on the
Africa Express train, stopping off around the country for concerts that included
collaborations with Damon Albarn as well as Paul McCartney and John Paul Jones,
who joined her backing band for the London finale. And she has continued acting
as well, with British and European performances in Toni Morrison and Peter Sellars’
much-praised theatrical/musical re-working of the Shakespearian story of
Desdemona, for which she wrote the music.
Now comes Beautiful Africa, an album of the powerful new songs, first heard in her
Donke project, reminding listeners it was rock music that first inspired Traoré’s
remarkable career. “I really like rock,” she said, “and it was because of rock that I
wanted to play music.” When she was growing up, an older brother used to play her
Dire Straits and Pink Floyd. “It wasn’t all I listened to—I discovered jazz and blues with
my dad, and Malian and other African music, and French chanson, but it was rock
music that made me want to learn guitar.”
There are three guitarists on the album, including Traoré herself, but though the
record is constructed around rock riffs and sturdy bass work, it still has a distinctively
West African feel, thanks to rousing performances from Mamah Diabaté on the
n’goni, the ancient, harsh-edged African lute. It’s an instrument that Traoré has used
in compositions throughout her career, and she argues, “You can put it with
everything. I’ve used n’goni in classical music projects, and it goes with blues, or
jazz, or rock and roll. It’s a great instrument!”
Traoré’s changes of musical direction usually start with “a sound that I imagine...a
sound inside my head.” She didn’t want to imitate what other people had done
“because I need to do what I imagine—that’s the reason I’m making music.” But she
needed someone to help her create the sound that she imagined, and eventually
decided on John Parish, the writer, guitarist, and producer who has worked with
Tracy Chapman, Eels, and PJ Harvey.
“I chose to work with John,” she says, “because when I listened to PJ Harvey or his
other work, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I could imagine what the man who
made this sound could do with me if we collaborated on my music. I was curious
about it, but not sure about getting what I was imagining.” During the recordings,
she said “he just asked me to listen to things and make my choice, and sometimes
when I didn’t like or understand something, he changed it.” And was she happy with
the results? “This is what I wanted to make and I’m happy. It’s even more than I
imagined.”
Traoré, Parish, and Stefano Pilia play guitars on the album, with Nicolai MunchHansen on bass, percussion from Sebastian Rochford (Polar Bear), ‘human beatbox’
effects from Jason Singh, and n’goni playing and backing vocals by fellow Malian
musicians Fatim Kouyaté and Bintou Soumounou, both members of the Foundation
Passerelle that Traoré established in Bamako, the Malian capital, to help her fellow
Malians prepare for careers in music and sustain the growth of Mali’s rich musical
culture.. Traoré was awarded the inaugural Roskilde Festival World Music Award in
2009 for her work with the Foundation.
The songs are in the West African language of Bambara, as well as French and
occasional bursts of English, and the often personal lyrics are concerned with
Traoré’s thoughts on her own life, and on her tragically battered homeland.
Mali is a country that has become known around the world for its extraordinary
musicians—from Traoré through to Amadou & Mariam, Ali Farka Touré, Toumani
Diabaté, Fatoumata Diawara, Tinariwen, Bassekou Kouyaté, Oumou Sangaré, Afel
Bocoum, Salif Keita, among others—and was once a great tourist destination,
famous for the desert cities and for the Niger river, as well as the celebrated Festival
in The Desert. But over the past year it has slipped into political chaos, with the
President overthrown in a military coup in the capital, and rebel groups taking over
large sections of the north of the country. The rebels then splintered into different
factions, with those initially fighting for independence in the north usurped by
extremist Islamist groups, some linked to al-Qaeda, and who went on to ban music
in the areas they controlled. Military forces from France, Mali, and other African
nations have fought to repel these advances.
The album’s title track, built around the sturdiest rock riff on the album, is very much
a love song to “battered, wounded Africa,” and reflects Traoré’s despair and fury at
what has happened to her country, while commenting on problems elsewhere in
Africa, from Ivory Coast to Congo. “The flood of my tears is in full spate, ardent is my
pain,” she sings, while arguing that, “Conflict is no solution...Lord, give us wisdom,
give us foresight.”
Other songs on the album include the thoughtful ballad “Sarama,” a praise song to
Malian women, partly sung in English, and the personal “Mélancolie,” a surprisingly
upbeat song about loneliness and sadness that has already become a radio hit in
France. Traoré says that she was lonely as a child, partly because her father was a
diplomat and constantly on the move, and partly because she was the middle child
in a family of seven.
Another, more upbeat song, “Sikey,” is also autobiographical, looking back at the
criticism she received when she first set out to become a professional musician, and
her determination to keep going. After all, she was not a griot, from a family of
traditional musicians, but the daughter of a diplomat. And although she had no
musical training, she gave up her studies in Brussels to return to Mali to create a new
form of music, in which her songs would be backed by her acoustic guitar, along
with n’goni and the xylophone-like balaba balafon, two instruments not normally
played together in Africa.
Her breakthrough came when she was hailed as the ‘African Discovery’ of 1997 by
Radio France Internationale after playing at the Angouleme Festival, in France, and
since then she has continued to experiment and explore new ideas. In 2003, her
album Bowmboï included a collaboration with Kronos Quartet and was awarded a
prestigious BBC Radio 3 World Music Award. Her 2009 album Tchamantché reflected
her new fascination with the Gretsch electric guitar, and won a Victoires de la
Musique, the French equivalent of a Grammy, as well as a Songlines Artist of the
Year Award for Traoré.
She has twice collaborated with the maverick director Peter Sellars, who in 2006
invited her to write and perform a work for his New Crowned Hope project,
celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birthday. Traoré replied by imagining
Mozart as a griot in the time of the 13th-century African ruler Soundiata Keita, whose
empire was centred in what is now Mali. She also recently collaborated with Nobel
Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison and Sellars on the theatre piece Desdemona,
bringing an African dimension to the story of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine. The
piece premiered in Vienna in the summer of 2011 and received its New York
premiere at Lincoln Center that fall; its UK premiere was at the Barbican in London in
the summer of 2012. The Guardian called it “a remarkable, challenging and bravely
original new work.”
It was the experience of acting in Desdemona, she says, that led her to create the
Damou (Dream) project, performed in London last year, in which she showed her
skills as a storyteller, as well as a singer, with her version of stories from The Epic of
Soundiata, dealing with events leading to the birth of Africa’s legendary ruler. These
are stories that would traditionally be told by Mali’s griots—indeed, Traoré said she
could only create the show because she has been learning from one of Mali’s finest
female griots, the singer Bako Dagnon.
Rokia Traoré is indeed a remarkable artist, and it is difficult to think of anyone else
who can switch from ancient Malian culture to acting and then to African rock and
roll. She will be touring Europe in May, performing in Desdemona in Amsterdam and
Naples in June, then returning to Europe at the end of June for what promises to be
a memorable treatment of the new songs from Beautiful Africa during a run of
summer festivals, including Glastonbury and Roskilde.
Robin Denselow